Book review

The Politics of the Poor: the East End of London, 1885-1914, a history book review

Jon Lawrence

Emmanuel College, Cambridge

The central theme
of this book can be summed up as 'neither electoral sociology
nor linguistic turn'. Instead, its author emphasises the micro
context of politics - how local social and cultural milieux
shaped the reception of political ideas, and hence the fortunes
of political parties. His focus is, thus, 'how … ideas
were filtered by localized social and economic structures and processes
of communication and popular culture' (p. 12). And, have no
doubt, for the most part he does this brilliantly - this is
the most thought-provoking and refreshingly original book about
British politics that I have read for some time. Brodie's
focus is East End politics between the Home Rule crisis and the
First World War, and his principal target is the historiography
of East End Conservatism. He convincingly demolishes accepted explanations
linking Conservative political strength in the East End to extreme
poverty, casual labour, protectionism and anti-alien sentiment.
Conservatism, he argues, was strongest in the least impoverished
areas of the East End - in places such as Stepney and Mile
End where, by Booth's standards, the bulk of the population
lived in 'comfort', and skilled workers and clerks outnumbered
the casual poor.

Contrary to the arguments of Davis and Tanner, Brodie demonstrates
that no part of the East End boasted a true 'slum vote'.
(1) Through painstaking work linking electoral registers to census
enumerators' returns, he shows that the typical East End house
in multiple occupation rarely boasted more than one voter, despite
case law suggesting that each sub-tenant was also entitled to claim
the household franchise. Landlords generally let the whole property
to a 'chief tenant', who would then let sections of
the house to sub-tenants to help cover the rent. Brodie shows not
only that 'chief tenants' were usually the only ones
to make it on to the register, but also that they generally took
more rooms than their tenants. Most chief tenants had large families,
which was why they needed more rooms, but they were also more prosperous
than their neighbours - they had to be to take on responsibility
for a whole house. This ground-breaking work on electoral registers
allows Brodie to demonstrate that, contrary to Paul Thompson's
arguments, manual workers dominated the electorate across the East
End, but that these electors were nonetheless far from representative
of the population as a whole. (2) Brodie shows that, in social and
economic terms, the composition of the Parliamentary electorate
was broadly similar across the East End, with a strong bias towards
regularly employed, older family men in all constituencies. Nowhere
did electoral politics reach down to the casual residuum, so this
cannot have been a bulwark of popular Conservatism (even if Liberals
sometimes liked to argue differently).

Brodie therefore reminds us that the East End was socially more
diverse than is often allowed. As others have observed, the apparent
separateness of 'the East End' helped fashion an 'imagined
slum' of depravity and immiseration, which contemporary 'explorers'
and philanthropists often had good reason to reinforce. (3) But
Brodie argues that we should take Booth's more sanguine view
of East End poverty at face value: that almost everywhere comfort
predominated over poverty, and that in much of the East End the
great political question was not 'what to do about the casual
poor?', but rather how to satisfy the aspirations of the better
off (though this was not something much welcomed by Booth). Throughout
the book Brodie makes good use of Booth and other late Victorian
and Edwardian social investigators. Particularly impressive are
the sections where he reconstructs snatches of working-class culture
and politics by carefully decoding investigators' texts (notably
Cornford on lodging house protectionism and Loane on working-class
resistance to social condescension). That said, sources are sometimes
accepted too uncritically if they support an argument - for
instance Krause's account of unemployed dockers insisting
that they had no time to protest in Trafalgar Square (p. 18), or
worse Rogers's partisan explanations of Liberal abstentionism
in the wake of the great 1886 electoral debacle (p. 127).

Overall, Brodie's grasp of the complexity and diversity of
working-class political culture is compelling. For instance, he
constructs a fascinating picture of coster politics, arguing that
their status in working-class districts meant all parties worked
hard to cultivate their support. He accepts that some local coster
unions came under the sway of anti-alien, Conservative politics
after 1900, but demonstrates that most did not. But Brodie does
more than simply demolish established mythologies about East End
Conservatism; he offers a rich and challenging analysis of the relationship
between religiosity and partisanship. Building on the work of Hugh
McLeod and Sarah Williams, Brodie insists that we need to recognise
the importance of 'marginal' denominational allegiances
among urban workers.(4) In other words, while, by national standards,
the numbers regularly attending church may have been fairly low
in the East End, the influence of the church was still extensive.
Brodie argues that marginal attachments counted for most in 'respectable'
working-class districts characterised by highly privatised, home-centred
life-styles. Here church visitors were more readily welcomed into
working-class homes, giving them the chance subtly to influence
political attitudes. According to Brodie, the influence of such
visitors was most important, not in making little Conservatives,
but in weakening the resolve of instinctive anti-Conservatives to
vote in certain critical elections. Brodie stresses that the East
End Conservative vote was remarkably stable across the four decades,
whereas the progressive vote varied wildly between elections, with
nadirs in 1886, 1895 and 1900 and peaks in 1892, 1906 and 1910.
He suggests that in elections where Liberalism was divided nationally,
Conservative-leaning visitors found it relatively easy to use their
influence with voters' wives to spread doubt about the personal
character of local progressive candidates, thereby encouraging the
abstentions needed to deliver Conservative victories. He points
to Bromley South-East as proof of his case - here both the
Church and its network of social visitors were strongly progressive
in outlook, and in consequence, he suggests, the progressive vote
proved much more stable.

It is here that the argument seems to break down somewhat. For
one thing, we are back to the old habit of explaining Conservative
success largely in terms of Liberal/Labour failure - the solid
block of working-class and lower-middle-class Conservatism is left
largely unexplained. But the problem runs deeper than this. It is
as though, having sketched out the social bases of politics more
thoroughly than his predecessors, Brodie is determined to construct
an argument that will wholly banish parties, ideas and issues from
the story. In consequence, little is uncovered about party organisation
and party activism in the East End, beyond a few fleeting references
such as the interesting discussion of a party worker's role
in boosting the lodger vote at Mile End East, or the analysis of
party efforts to woo costermongers and other potential political
intermediaries. The Primrose League is mentioned, but its relative
strength in different parts of the East End, and hence whether it
may have reinforced the political influence of church visitors,
is not explored. Similarly, we learn nothing about the growing use
of 'lady canvassers' by both parties in the late nineteenth
century, though these too may have reinforced the influence Brodie
detects at work across the 'respectable' East End, particularly
if the Conservatives made better use of this electioneering weapon
than their rivals. But then in truth we do not hear much about the
relative strength of the parties at all - not even in the
crucial field of registration work. And it is not just parties that
are largely ignored in this study: so too is the whole world of
public politics. Perhaps because the emphasis is on the conservatism
of a well-to-do, privatised working class, there is little discussion
of the rough-and-tumble of late Victorian and Edwardian popular
politics. This is a pity because it would be interesting to know
if election meetings were less common in Brodie's more affluent,
home-centred districts, such as Mile End, than in the old, central
districts, such as St George's and Whitechapel. It would also
be interesting to know whether meetings were more popular among
Liberals than Conservatives, and whether their importance declined
over time. But then more domestic forms of political communication,
such as the election leaflet and the politicised local press, are
also written out of the story.

Brodie wants to offer an explanatory model which rejects the current
fashion for emphasising political discourse and the active role
of party in the construction of political identities. But while
his frustration with the constructivists' indifference to
questions of reception is understandable, Brodie falls into the
opposite trap of ignoring the world of formal politics altogether.
State policy, political issues and party rhetoric are all treated
as matters of little consequence compared with the micro-level social
interactions said to shape electoral choice in the East End. This
preference for sociological over political explanation leaves many
key issues unexplained. For instance, we are frequently told that
although the Conservative vote was more stable at Parliamentary
elections, progressive voters consistently turned out in greater
numbers in municipal elections. Strikingly, in both cases only progressive
voting behaviour is explained. At the Parliamentary level we are
alerted to the social influence of church visiting, while at the
municipal level we are told that Liberal voters polled in greater
numbers because they felt strong loyalty to the Radical clubs that
were so active in local politics. This is an interesting hypothesis,
though one that requires considerably more work on the relationship
between voter turnout and candidate type. Did Liberal 'outsiders'
poll much worse than 'locals'? Did club officials always
outpoll other Liberals? Why did church influence not create similar
loyalties among Conservatives?

However, even if one accepts Brodie's arguments about the
differential propensity to vote at local and national level, this
still leaves three major questions unanswered. First, why was the
Conservative vote so stable when the electorate was so shifting
(Brodie estimates that up to a third of the electorate would be
new voters at any given general election)? Second, has Brodie really
disproved John Davis's original argument that Conservatives
polled more heavily in Parliamentary than local elections because
they were successfully mobilised around issues such as empire, Ireland,
war and protection - issues which appeared to have little
relevance to municipal politics? (5) Third, why could radical clubs
apparently mobilise support for candidates at local elections, but
not national? For Brodie, this is simply a question of the limits
of personal influence, but perhaps political factors were also at
work. We have long known that many London Radicals were dissatisfied
with aspects of national Liberal politics, and with the cliques
controlling Liberal organisation across much of the capital. Were
such issues really irrelevant to the vitality of Liberalism as an
electoral force in parts of the East End?

There are, in short, significant problems with Brodie's determination
to ignore ideas and activism in favour of focusing narrowly on micro-level
social and cultural contexts. This approach is ultimately no less
problematic than histories which interpret the so-called 'linguistic
turn' as a licence to stop worrying about old-fashioned issues
like social structure and the franchise. In this work Brodie has
developed new and compelling methodologies for investigating the
social bases of politics, but perhaps, because his grasp of the
social is so strong, he leans too heavily on purely sociological
explanations of politics. The result is a study which, far from
exploring the reception of ideas, treats ideas as all but irrelevant
- only context matters. Some middle ground, combining the
strengths of Brodie's non-determinist sociology with the insights
of discourse-centred 'new political history', would
seem preferable, and would surely generate more compelling historical
explanations. Such an approach might also allow working people a
more sophisticated political consciousness than they are accorded
in The Politics of the Poor.

Hugh McLeod, Religion
and Irreligion in Victorian England: How Secular was the Working
Class?, (Bangor, 1993); S. C. Williams, Religious Belief
and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880-1939,
(Oxford, 1999).Back to (4)

John Davis, Reforming
London: the London Government Problem, 1855-1900, (Oxford,
1988).Back to (5)